This one is about me.
Who I think I am and what I think I'm trying to do.
Let's get started. "Remember the past, cherish the present and work for tomorrow, the time is now" - NAS
It's been a long time since I was serious about making art as a career. Since the days of myspace and flip phones, with a family to feed and my service in the Army, I put art-making low on the priority list. Despite gallery shows, local media coverage, and a healthy beginning, I shut myself off from thinking about art-making. Yet this urge has always been with me. It was there when I needed it to talk out my thoughts and visualize the challenges that I ran across. I abused it in some regards. Hid it sometimes. Left it on the shelf others. But this mind, the half of my brain that sees the world can't be shut up.
Making my mark. "Sticking feathers up your butt doesn't make you a chicken" - Tyler Durden
Something like that. Mustang Six [art + design] is a one-man-band name, a double-shot brand of ego and muddled experience as much as anything else. Self-realized hype. But it is who I am inside. Made up of what I've done. Good and bad, right and wrong. This is life imitating art baby. This is who I am. A man on a path to mastery of self. From the day I stepped away from making art professionally, I've fulfilled the need to create with other processes; culinary arts, personal improvements, all the while making mental note of the steps needed to perfect the delivery of the idea to the real world for consumption. My wife laughs that I 'plate' the dinners I cook. Yet for me, this was also the hardest part of my work. I always felt I was not polished enough. So perhaps I was subconsciously incubating to the right moment. Now.
What I think I'm trying to do. "I fly a starship across the universe divide" - Johnny Cash
I would doodle this in the margins of whatever I could find anyway. Why not let someone else see it. And just maybe earn some cheddar. So here goes, an old man in the sea of new bursting digital possibilities.
The Art Kitchen, My Workspace. "Remember what the dormouse said, feed your head." - Jefferson Airplane
Since my art hiatus, I've kept and collected a studio's worth of furniture, drawers full of paint tubes, and reused tomato sauce cans stuffed with brushes. I'm choosing to run a spartan studio as I re-engage my senses. Boiling down to the essentials of what I need to execute my work. I am forcing myself to reach the limits of what these materials can do, to familiarize myself with the motions of the tools rather than chasing the tools themselves. Mastering the fundamentals and working through to solve the problems that not having things present. I keep a large newsprint sketchbook on a drafting table next to my computers so I can dump ideas almost as fast as they come. This has been very helpful especially when I get stuck. On the digital desk, I'm running a lightweight surface, a second monitor, and an old Wacom tablet. I keep a Sonos speaker in the corner pumping out my Spotify feed of carefully crafted playlists. In the opposite corner is my fine art easel. Currently, I have the painting called "Take Hold" staring back at me. This is one of a series of large format pieces that I have been wrestling with for years.
Backslider, My Process. "All that time, in the dark" - The Toadies
This will change. All things do. What is now is simply a playlist of good and bad ideas. Like a memory of your favorite song the first time, you heard it. When making art I focus on this change. Add - subtract, express - redact. My canvases are built on ideas that come and go. When I sit down to design I start with the most recognizable image and start reducing, twisting, and reimagining. Then I build on what is left. Doing and undoing at the same time.